Adrian Saunders

Winning the Inbox War in 2012

2012-01-16T08:34:00.001+11:00

Using Segmentation to Survive – and Win – the Inbox War

If you are not segmenting your list or if you don’t have a solid list hygiene procedure, it’s almost certain that most of your email messages are heading for the junk folder or worse, en masse.

To add to this concern, many Email Service Providers (ESPs) are still using obtusely inaccurate metrics that allow them to claim great delivery rates. I have personally used more than 12 different ESPs in the last 11 years and none of them claimed anything other than great deliverability. It is simply not the truth.

For many ESPs, the delivery rate is calculated as the number of emails sent minus the emails received back from subscribers’ mail servers that are marked as having dead or undeliverable addresses.

What this hides is that even when email subscribers send messages straight to a bulk mail folder or trap them, the sending mail server counts them as messages that have been received. In other words, sent, received and delivered is not the same thing.

Even the term “delivered” involves a world of considerations. Are messages delivered to a spam trap, a junk folder or to the inbox? If delivered to the inbox, are the images visible? Are the links working? Has your email been pushed to the bottom of the pile?

All this is why it is so vital that you segment your database and target your messages to meaningful subscriber groups. Segmentation increases the relevance of your messages and dramatically lifts the likelihood that your subscribers will engage with your communication.

Segmentation has, until recently, been considered a best practice. However, it is rapidly becoming a mandatory requirement to ensure your brand’s digital survival. Marketing email is now being judged for delivery or for junking by the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) according to the level of engagement your subscribers have with your messages.

Factors like open and click rates are already major considerations in the filtering process. Whether subscribers mark your email as trustworthy or hit the spam button also directly affects whether your messages make it to the inbox or not.

It is the mandate of every ISP to reduce the amount of spam and the perceived clutter in their users’ inboxes. ISPs and their postmasters are constantly seeking more data to use in discriminating against email that their users are not interested in.

Segmentation and providing more relevant messaging to subscribers is now more than a moral imperative. It is necessary for your digital survival.

How to Segment, and Why

Segmentation starts at the point of opt-in. When people are opting in, you have a unique opportunity to collect the vital data you need to know about them. How many questions you can ask before subscribers get turned off is widely debated. For instance, I recently created an opt-in profiling process that takes no less than seven pages and around 12 minutes to complete. Prevailing wisdom suggests that this process is too long, that subscribers would never stick around long enough to complete it. Actual evidence contradicts this assertion.

In this case, such a long process works because it was developed from the point-of-view of the subscriber, showing or hiding questions depending on information provided in a previous answer. So if, for example, someone tells us that she is 80 years old and retired, we don’t ask how many children she has under the age of five. The end result is a survey that makes sense and doesn’t require subscribers to continually answer questions that are of no relevance to them.

You may not have the resources to develop an opt-in process at this level of sophistication. But you should collect as a minimum the following information:

• Age

• Gender

• Zip/Postal Code

• Job Function

These four data points will allow you to extrapolate out more complex assumptions about your subscribers. For example, if I know a subscriber’s zip or postcode and job function, I can fairly accurately determine his or her annual income. This is important because, when asking subscribers directly to provide their income, we get answers that are likely not true. For whatever reason, people tend to lie about their income but not about their location or job function.

When collecting information about age, use year of birth as a minimum. That way you can still calculate age accurately 10 years from now for subscribers still in your database. Although collecting birth month and date is more ideal, asking for full date of birth can be a concern for people worried about identity theft.

Gender is important, too, especially since males respond completely differently to non-relevant email messages than females. Our experience has shown that it is essentially a waste of time to send males female-centric promotions. At the same time, females tend to be less reluctant to consider offers that are targeted to males.

Asking about job function rather than industry is considerably more useful if you have to decide between one and the other. By having a granular list of job functions, you can create segments or groups that aggregate them into meaningful segments such as “IT decision-makers” or “frequent business travellers.”

For personalization purposes, I also collect first name and last name. Address data is also helpful, especially if you have a process in place to validate postal data as it is entered. This will ensure a clean database that will save you time and money in the long run.

Marital status is also useful for determining what products and or services people will subscribe to or be likely to purchase.

Segmenting with Psychographic Data

Psychographics are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests or lifestyles. One of the most effective ways to obtain psychographic information from your subscribers, clients and/or prospects is to survey them. Well-designed survey questions will give you valuable insight into what your subscribers value. Survey data can also be used to give feedback on your products and services in order to shape their development going forward.

Psychographic data identifies useful segments that, when overlayed with demographic and behavioural data, can be used to effectively score a subscriber’s likelihood of engaging with a product or service.

In addition to surveys, psychographics can also be obtained during the opt-in process or post sign-up from preference centres.

An important caveat here is that what people think they want and what they actually want is sometimes not the same thing. I see consistent evidence of this in one of the consumer databases I work with: people who say they are interested in weight loss are in fact less likely to engage with email messages on the subject than the general population.

Segmenting by Behaviours

Proactively targeting subscribers based on their recent behaviours can also dramatically increase the results from your email messaging. At its most basic level, triggering email to go out on the anniversary of opt-in creates uplift in deliverability for two reasons. First, the time that the trigger email goes out has a higher likelihood of corresponding to the time when the subscriber is typically engaged in such a way to take the time to read the message. Second, the fact that these emails are triggered individually and not in bulk means that there is no sending volume threat to the receiving ISP, which massively increases the chances of the message being delivered to the inbox.

In my experience, sending the same message triggered instead of in bulk routinely delivers a 3 to 400 percent uplift in open and click rates. This remains true even when the subscriber has opted in very recently.

Using analytics tags to trigger email sends raises the bar yet again. By having simple JavaScript tags loaded on your website or parts of your site, you can easily create a page or cart abandonment program, or target people who have been to a certain number of pages in a certain section. For example, you could send a recovery message to subscribers who have entered items in the shopping cart but did not make it to the confirmation page.

More commonly used is targeting subscribers based on their interactions with your email messages. A good email program will allow you to target subscribers who have/ have not opened a message or series of messages and/or clicked any link. A great email program will allow you to target subscribers who clicked a specific link or, even better, an aggregate set of links.

Going a step further, a really great enterprise email program will provide it all – the ability to target subscribers who visited one page on your site and clicked a particular button, and who clicked on a certain set of links in the last 60 days, and who prefer open-toed shoes but have not bought a pair of shoes in last three days. Such a program will then render different content according to whether subscribers are on the west coast or the east coast and will point them to a store that is closest to their postal code cluster. Of course, it will also personalise the email to their preferred first names and link them to an “update my preferences” page.

And that’s the answer to not just surviving, but winning, the inbox war.

How to create more revenue from your website traffic

2010-07-29T00:39:00.001+10:00

Your company has probably spent considerable funds developing a functional website. It may look good, and reflect what readers want. But is it making the company money?

Most publishers have an advertising model of sorts. If you are only making money from display ad sales, you could probably add a zero to your check by implementing a properly managed email marketing strategy.

Golden opportunities are not hard to find. It may be as simple as working with market research companies to help them reach a target niche.

People love doing market research surveys, often for a small incentive. Actually, one of our clients has built a successful list by laser targeting people who do surveys without incentive.

To make big money, first you must build a big list
We’ve found that most publishers do a poor job of capturing email details. Mainly because they believe nobody will sign up. But you should put aside that doubt.

A well thought out opt-in program will see around 30% of visitors either subscribe or divulge the necessary details for further contact if the value proposition is fair. In other words, the visitor will register if they care about the offer and the end result.

Once this 30% sign up (start to do the math on your traffic numbers now) a proficient email marketing program will:

warm those people to your brand

increase interest in your relevant ad offers

help you earn revenue for life from visitors who never intend to return to your site.

Maximising your advertising revenue
Online Ad Networks don't tend to care about maximising yield for publishers –it’s just not their driving aim. And ad agencies don’t usually want to deal with individual publishers. So that leaves the publisher out on their own struggling to grow their revenue. Or does it?

Working with a publisher’s representative like Cogent (shameless plug) gives website owners an opportunity to take an even share of what is usually a much wider and deeper advertising schedule.
Online ad spends are often highly targeted. This extremely relevant match will mean more revenue for both you and the publisher - and seem natural to the end users’ experience.

Advertising packages
If you have high web traffic, you can put together profiled lists that are attractive to the advertiser, lucrative and actually enhance the end user experience.

But even with the best ad inventory (banner impressions, email newsletter ad spots), you will need to think carefully about:

how to package it

which networks to partner with

how to apply best practices to your marketing efforts.

If this is all causing your head to spin, have a think about getting us to conduct a “site audit”. This is where we make specific recommendations based on your brand considerations, internal limitations and end user profile.

Site audits end up giving you multiple ways forward with new revenue strategies as well as maximising yield from your existing advertising earnings.

It had to happen

2010-07-28T11:37:00.000+10:00

I watched this today on Ted.com. I remember watching Star Trek when I was a kid thinking it was far out to image a door that opened as you approach it. This spins me right out and I like it!

Making a Declaration

2009-12-26T12:10:00.000+11:00

This month my brother and I declared that we intend to grow our business to a 30 million dollar company by June 30th. This is no small task given that this time last year we were more of a screw up than a start up.

Why did we do such a thing? Our business is making a profit now and there is no need to push ourselves unnecessarily.

We did it because we want the challenge as well as the results.

I abhor mediocrity and couldn’t think of anything worse than going through all of the agony and ecstasy of owning your own business only to achieve a “reasonable” result.

I want to learn who we need to be to make this goal happen. I don’t know what this achievement will take but I can’t wait to find out. Given I only have six months to achieve a 2.5 Million dollar month, I guess I wont have to wait.

So why didn’t I write this goal on a piece of paper and put it in a box like I used to?

By declaring the goal publicly I hope to inspire others into helping to generate the result. Sure it will get a load of scoffs from the knockers, but that should fire up my “I’ll show you” personality. It also puts us on the hook for delivering it. We have an audience now who expect us to deliver. When we do, we and our audience will know us as people of our word for whom anything is possible.

It’s curious what happens when you make such a declaration. Immediately you start to view your opportunities through a filter that asks, “Is this going to contribute to us making a 30 million dollar business in 6 months?” You begin to realize how much time has been spent on activities that don’t work towards that goal.

You then become aware that it was not going to happen if you hadn’t declared it. It wasn’t going to happen because we never held our opportunities up to the 30 million dollar filter. As a result we might have spent our days working on activities that didn’t produce great results.

So why do we want to make so much money? Is it just ego? Maybe. Someone is going to make it – it might as well be us. We are great at what we do and improving – there is no question in our minds that we deserve the business.

More importantly, we are passionate about what can be achieved with the money. In particular we love to bring opportunities to people that otherwise would not have them afforded to them. Whether they be people living in developing nations that otherwise would not have opportunity, or people in our own culture who are unable to see opportunity or are disadvantaged in some other way.

Also, business is a game and people love playing games. Its time to stop pretending we don’t need to win. Its time to come out swinging!

Why You Are Broke

2009-09-12T10:51:00.006+10:00

When I was eleven, my father was in prison for misappropriation of funds – a euphemism for taking his clients money to pay his staff.

One night my Mother took my sister and I to the grocery store and bought what seemed like a feast of tropical fruits for us to enjoy after dinner. It seemed like a strange thing to do, given it was an ordinary weeknight.

After dinner Mum spoke the words that changed my view life from that point forward. “Enjoy this meal kids” she said…”I have no idea where the next one is coming from”.

In that most frightening moment I made a declaration to myself that I never would never feel that desperate or impotent again. I vowed that my children would never have to hear such words from my lips.

This defining moment set up for me a pattern of being that drove for me from that day forward.

I set for myself a demand that I would achieve financial independence even though I had no idea what that even looked like.

Anthony Robbins says that people are more motivated when moving away from pain than when moving toward pleasure. I was given an unfair advantage in that regard.

I fail a lot. More than most people. I won’t go into my prolific list of my seemingly insurmountable failures. I will leave that for my book.

I believe what matters is how a person relates to failure. It seems to me that people who succeed over and over again have no personal relationship to failure. Simply put, failure is an event and not a person or personal trait.

In my Internet marketing business I have introduced thousands of people to dozens of companies that provide exceptional products and services. Many of them offer fair and equitable vehicles to earn unlimited income.

So why is my business not a millionaire producing factory?

I believe most people are looking for something external to themselves to generate their success. That’s why expressions like “secrets to success” cause information products to sell like hot cakes.

The reality is that success principles are no longer a secret. Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich in the later years of the world’s deepest financial depression. If you pick up that book today and follow the instructions you will succeed - guaranteed. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of books that you can buy for less than $50 that will give you all of the information you need to be a millionaire or achieve whatever financial goal you aspire to. It is unlikely that you will follow the instructions though.

Most people want to be wealthy about as much as they would enjoy receiving a massage. Receiving a massage equates to how much effort they are willing to devote to attain their wealth.

Every day I hear stories from people about how they spent an amount of money (always a lot in their view) setting themselves up in a business and “it” didn’t work.

On further investigation, they usually gave the business up in about a month or two. They gave up as soon as they had collected enough no’s to support their view that their current life was the best they could do.

Don’t get me wrong. I used to be the same. Problem is, once you see the matrix for what it is, there is no going back.

People are desperate to sell their view of the world. It’s an intoxicating story. We live in a world that supports this impotent view. A view of a world where we don't have enough "stuff".

Many people have no idea that their life has a consequence.

They think they are trying to succeed for themselves. They want to succeed so that their life gets more comfortable.

It doesn’t even occur to them that they might have a responsibility to themselves, the people they love and indeed humanity to get over this self-induced trance. They refuse to wake up from this addictive delusion of lack.

We live in a world of abundant prosperity where opportunity abounds. If you don’t see this truth to be self-evident then you have some self development work to do.

The question is who are you willing to give up being to succeed?

I am going to make a few statements that I believe describe what there is to give up. My assertions are axioms drawn from what I have learned to date. Take what you need and leave the rest. But consider this. The points that aggravate you the most may require deeper investigation.

Aggravation often happens when we are trying to hide something from ourselves. Our ego doesn’t’ want us to be uncomfortable. It will do anything it can to stop us from getting over our limiting beliefs. It sounds exactly like the voice of reason and uses our own voice against us. Consider that aggravation may be a sign that you have hit pay dirt in terms of what there is to get over

Broke is a lifestyle choice. You chose it and commit to it every day. Sometimes situations happen that take away all of your money. This doesn’t make you broke. This is just a mess you need to clean up. Clean it up and get on with it.
Learning how to sell is vital to succeeding financially. The good news is that you are selling every moment of every day. The bad news is that you are probably selling a small, broke and largely useless view of what is possible for yourself and others. You probably surround yourself with people who support and enable this view. You are addicted to it. Your conviction in this lie makes you a perfect salesperson for your product. Your product is being broke.
Being broke is not virtuous. It is just being broke. You are no use to the world broke unless you have forsaken worldly goods to make a difference in another way. Forsaking wealth for spiritual attainment is a higher form of wealth. Don’t kid yourself that you have achieved this kind of wealth. Even the Dalai Lama says that you should not become a monk if shirking your worldly responsibilities is your motivation.
The world is not full of people who just want your money. Con artists do exist. The fact that they exist is not an excuse give up on yourself and the world you live in. So maybe you have been ripped off. Maybe it wasn’t just your version of a story. Maybe you really were duped. So what? Do you think you are the lone ranger? Get over it and get on with it.
You haven’t succeeded financially because you don’t care enough about yourself, the people you love or the rest of the world to get off your ass and achieve it. You can’t feed the world or give sight to the poor if you are broke and full of self-pity. You just can’t be bothered and you are making excuses for it.

Then again, I could be wrong.

Letting Go of My Business

2009-08-31T09:53:00.004+10:00

This month, I led our company in an exercise that effectively turned our entire organization over to the employees to run. After a period of rigorous self-examination through some personal development work I realised that I was a limiting factor for my organizations growth.

All the experience that I have collected had served well to create the organization. However, the same evidence was supporting a limited theory of what was possible for us. This theory was limited to what I was being, doing and creating.

I recently sold a similar business that hit a similar plateau in its growth. I was now aware that the only common dominator in both situations was me.

Having recently read “The Three Laws of Performance”, a brilliantly inspired book, I was able to find the process that I knew needed to be created.

We created a planning day in a business-as-usual way. We discussed the numbers; current challenges and invited everybody to contribute in a normal problem-solving format.

In this process my brother Damian (our CEO) laid out some of the “cold hard facts”. Painting a picture of what our future would look like if we continued to travel in the direction that we were. The direction we were heading was not bleak, but it wasn’t inspiring either.

Wrapping up for lunch, we asked our colleagues to turn their attention to the afternoon in which we would create a space for a new future.

I have to be honest, the process made me nervous at first. I grappled with the fear that my business was too “key-man centric” to survive without me – a fear I now realise was more based in ego than reality.

I felt there was something else that needed to get out of the way before we started.

I confessed that I had worked in organizations where we had created a future as a management team. We then engineered exercises to convince the staff to buy in to our objectives.

The intentions were honorable at the time. However, to me the process was inauthentic. I promised that our process would have no such parameters to restrain it.

I confessed too that I had no idea how the afternoon was going to turn out and that I needed assistance to create it.

We started by agreeing on qualities that existed in us individually that were common to us as a group. Qualities such as open-mindedness, sense of humour and integrity came up immediately.

Once the list was generated and agreed upon within the group. I asked that we only share within the context of these qualities for the rest of the afternoon.

Agreement was easy to reach given that the qualities were self-generated.

We then had a space for a new future. I asked that we forgot all the evidence that we had of what is possible and let go in dreaming of new possibilities. We took a few minutes to write out what we dreamed our lives would be like in 2 years.

One question that I threw out while the team were writing was “what would you like to be acknowledged for?”
When I asked this question, I had no idea it was going to awaken some of the most inspiring insights for the day.

We then created a future for our organization that was bigger, brighter and clearer than anything I had thought up myself.

I believe we had a view of each other and were speaking within that context. When we shared who we really were and what drives us there was a new respect and therefore a different quality of listening.

What I now notice is that we are speaking to each other in the context of whom we aspire to becoming. In effect – we are holding each other accountable for and supporting each other’s dreams.

We can now put our business under deeper scrutiny without the fear of the upsetting the people involved (mainly me to be honest). This new space allows us to objectively discard old assumptions leading the way to new innovations.

Our team has recently created some fantastic new innovations. I will share these as they develop.

Where my brother and I previously felt as though we were dragging the company along, we now have an organisation that pushes us from behind.

Note to Self

2009-08-24T19:36:00.005+10:00

You may be reading this because you have lost some faith. Maybe you are feeling a loss of power or you just like to be reminded of who you are and what is possible for you.

Remember that anxiety is a lack of faith. You have forgotten that everything will turn out well in the future.

Remember that anxiety does not create a heightened state of readiness for future inevitabilities. This is a story that you have sold yourself to give reason to what is nothing more or less than a lack of faith in yourself and the people around you.

Remember that when you remind yourself of imagined pain and suffering in the past that you are selling yourself a story. There is only one version of this story and that version of the story is yours. You have chosen this version of the story. You continue to choose it. You use it to justify playing smaller than you are.

The story you sell yourself does not exist in any time or place in the physical world except in the neural pathways that you have chosen to create. You have created them as a choice. It may have been the best choice available to you at the time but you are still selling yourself this old newspaper. You pay an unacceptable price when you choose to review this story.

Remember that you live in a world that nurtures the innate lethargy that your body wants you to sink to. It is your ego that drags you to the couch to watch banal dramas on the TV. TV has the capacity to move, transfix and entrance you in an instant. Its effects are as strong as any narcotic – almost impossible to escape. For the most part there is nothing on television to elevate you to a higher state. There are only drama’s that allow you a vicarious sample of what an exciting life might be like. You enjoy this simulated experience without having to put yourself on the line to receive it.

Remember that news programs incapacitate you with feelings of overwhelming hopelessness at the tragedies in the world. You have chosen to dwell in these feelings of uselessness to justify your own inertia. This feeling of impotence that you choose is your justification for not fulfilling on your moral imperative to make a positive contribution to the world in any way you can.

Remember that if you don’t master your body it will master you.

Remember that you have a voice in your head that tells you that you aren’t important. You wrap it up in a story that you sell yourself in which you are a modest individual. This imagined humility is false and inauthentic. Nobody believes it. Nobody benefits when you play smaller than you are. You cannot stand for the possibility of great things for yourself and others with this racket playing our in your head.

Remember that there is nothing external to yourself that you need in order to create a magnificent life. You are whole and perfect. The idea that you are in some way defective is imagined.

Remember your past exists entirely in your imagination. You have other recollections that can support an entirely new view of your past. These recollections can support and give evidence to any new future possibility that you create.

Remember that you can choose at any moment in your life the direction of the rest of your life. Remember that how you perform and live in life is entirely a product of how the world occurs to you. There are few things that cannot be changed in an instant by choosing the way that the situation occurs to you. You have this power, you always have had.

Remember that there is no past and no future there is only now. The future is a figment of your imagination; invent a future worth living into. Invent a future that draws you toward it. Life will bring this future into the now.

Remember that the access to what you have committed to achieving is in removing the delusions of self-imposed limitation. It is just a choice. Make your choice.

Marketing is no substitute for integrity!

2009-08-09T13:24:00.000+10:00

Mark Buckman the CMO of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) took a swipe at the Direct Marketing industry for accepting a 2% average response rate.

The rant which included mention of the 30 million dollars spent each year came after a CBA DM ad campaign allegedly produced a 20% response rate.

Some of us old-timers can instantly recognize that the response rate quoted could only be yielded from an incentivized publishing environment. That is, the end users would have been given some incentive to engage with the brand. An embarrassment that will reveal itself as the downstream data from this campaign is considered.

Please know that I make this assertion completely ignorant of the specifics of the campaign in question. What I do know is that a 20% response rate is possible without any additional enticements to the end user. I also know that no product produced by the CBA in the last 10 years qualifies for such an ovation from end users.

So what does it take to attain a response as high as 20%? While there are many factors that contribute to a successful DM campaign, one of two elements is essential – a great brand and a great offer. Having both elements in play will virtually guarantee a high response.

It has been a long time since I have allowed mailing of a “big four” bank offer to my list. The big four banks are one of the only advertising groups that send my unsubscribe rate through the roof. I am talking more unsubscribes than clicks!

Hold on – don’t the CBA have a great brand? Mark Buckman says they do. Here is my rather long-winded point…

Your brand is not the construct that the marketing department decide it is. Your brand is your reputation.

The reputation of the “big four” Australian banks stinks. Just ask anybody in the street.

So why does their reputation stink?

It stinks because of their cynical attempts to defraud their customers of every last dollar through newly invented fees and charges. It stinks because of their deliberate failure to make banking efficient for the end user. It stinks because we are subjected to endless reports of growing profits while having to watch our accounts constantly for exorbitant expenses associated with any oversight on our part. It stinks because we watch our government guarantee banks survival when they wouldn’t spare a second thought for ours.

We are clever, us humans. We know where these profits come from.

You can’t polish a turd. Sure, you can cover it up, put icing sugar on it, spend millions of dollars giving it a new and “hip” geometrical shape. But there is no prize for guessing what is underneath the veneer.

Open your ears Mark Buckman. Listen to your customers. Give people what they want where possible and have the courage to face your own demons as an organisation. Clean up the messes you have created and commit to producing an internal culture that inspires your people to listen to and exceed your customers’ expectations.

If you were a bank that did that – you wouldn’t need to spend 30 million on DM.

Does Your Business Already Have What it Takes?

2009-07-12T16:54:00.000+10:00

For a traditional business, embracing online marketing techniques can seem like a daunting task. SEO, SEM, Social Media, Landing Pages, Email Marketing, Blogs, Twitter. It can seem all too confusing. Even those who live and breathe the space struggle to keep up with the pace of change.

So what hope is there for the traditional offline business? It’s really no wonder that online budgets don’t reflect the power of the audience that can be reached.

As an industry, we have largely failed to provide offline businesses with a compelling reason to take the plunge and harness the virtually limitless possibilities that the web has to offer.

One, seemingly obvious, concept continues to occur to me. A reality highlighted by my own experience selling face-to-face in offline roles.

Businesses that effectively sell their products and services already know what they need to succeed online. They just may not know it.

So where, in your company, does this expertise lie? Hopefully you already have at least one high-performing sales person on your side. So, what could this person tell you to create online lead generation success? Any top-gun sales person will tell you that sales success occurs as a result of the questions that are asked of your prospect, not a presentation of the features, benefits, price or positioning of your product. Before being asked a series of well-considered questions, your prospect is unlikely to be in a mental space where they are consciously reminded of their needs and pains. Therefore, they are unlikely to be ready to consider a solution for their ills.

By asking your prospects a series of pointed questions relating to their current circumstances, needs and pain points, an effective sales person can lead the individual to a mental clearing where an informed purchase decision is possible.

Your web pages can affect the same result! Your sales teams poignant and well-considered questions can (and should) form the basis of your landing pages or pre-sales questionnaires.

In the case of complex products such as real estate investment, network marketing or solution sales, a survey style questionnaire can save you hours of wading through tyre-kicking suspects on the phone to find genuinely interested prospects. In effect, what you are trying to achieve is a process where tyre-kickers drop out and well-qualified prospects are ready to engage.

The benefits of dynamic coding become apparent when you show and hide questions to different individuals based on their previous responses. For example, a female CEO may go down one path of enquiry while a male retiree may go down another.

Using a questioning process that leads clients to a point where they are motivated to enquire further will allow your company to extract real prospects from, what was previously, the general internet population.

Additionally, your sales staff interacts with well-qualified, genuinely interested prospects. Their morale and productivity will inevitably improve.

Are there still tyre kickers? Sure. But your data should be able to identify them up front. Your staff can decide when, if at all they want to take on these more challenging prospects. Notoriously ineffective cold calling can be a thing of the past.

A few of our clients have built their sales processes entirely around these inbound leads. One of our most recent clients has gone from struggling to get suspects, to a full-time team of 25 sales people converting a steady stream of inbound leads in just 12 days.

Considering the above, you can now provide a prescriptive brief to your web designer.

Despite assertions to the contrary, web design companies rarely know more about how to sell your products than you. The fact that the forum has changed to online does not mean that your prospective clients have changed. It just makes them more accessible.

Banner Ads - The Essential Facts

2009-06-13T22:32:00.000+10:00

In the last five years I have had the unusual experience of running an advertising operations department in a premium publisher network, whilst also managing my own media buys for consumer panels.

Below are some key lessons I learned that may challenge your assumptions about how you are spending or planning to spend your acquisition budget.

These are lessons learned from watching or managing thousands of campaigns running on some of the worlds best known web publishing properties.

You need a frequency cap.
Whatever you do – get your banner ads frequency capped. Frequency caps are a method of capping the number of times a user sees an ad within a period of time. As a general rule, the likelihood that a user will respond after 7 views of an ad takes a swift nose-dive. So to start out cap your spend to 7 views per user per day or week if it is a site that sees a high rate of return. Frequency caps not only reduce the wastage of your spend but they will increase the unique audience that your ads will get in front of. The ad server will try to serve the same number of ads but will seek new viewers to show them to.

Page Duration
The amount of time people spent on a page is critical to the potential response of your campaign. Transactional portals like auction and ticketing sites often struggle to gain competitive response rates.

These low responses are thought to be a combination of the low average page duration (time a user spends on a page before clicking away or refreshing) and the fact that the end user is focusing on the purchase or auction process. With the exception of “thank you” or receipt pages I typically avoid transactional sites.

Thank You Pages
A highly effective and often overlooked media opportunity is the receipt or “thank you” page at the end of the purchase process. This page sits at the point where the user has not only completed their journey but is (presumably) satisfied and looking for the next thing to do. Here is the real kicker – they often have their credit card in their hand. I often see responses on “thank you” pages that are 10-100 times that of other pages!

Content Sites
Content sites tend to respond considerably better as the average page duration tends to be higher. That means your ad sits on the page longer and the end user is exposed to it longer. It is still just one impression. If the page duration is very high – say in the minutes, you may get by with a frequency cap of 1 per user.

Sizes
Ad sizes matter. The 468x60 that was ubiquitous in the early days of the web is virtually invisible to the human eye now. I would assert that the 728x90 is rapidly following suit. The 300x250 or “island” banner works best when floating in a sea of text and the 700x300 on a logout or “thank you” page is the king. Again, apply your frequency caps in all cases.

Text
Text rocks! Text ads more often than not outperform banner or visual creative’s. Users have trained themselves to seek text information on a page. A “content clip” or “contextual” advertisement that relates to the content on the page can be very effective. Text ads more often than not outperform visual ads.

Optimization
Your network or publisher will optimize your campaign just as soon as hell freezes over. You need to dictate when and how a campaign is optimized. It is typical for a network or publisher to blow your entire budget for a month with no frequency cap or optimization before giving you a report and a lame suggestion for optimization. I know how my campaigns are going to perform after 1000 impressions. Media buying is best suited to control freaks.

Rich Media
Flash or Rich Media ads rarely outperform animated gif ads. Your creative agency doesn’t want you to know that. However rich media is essential if you want to run a movie or OTP (Over The Page) creative.

Just trust me on this one…
The best background color for a white background site is black. Your creative agency really doesn’t want you to know that – they usually think black backgrounds are perverse. The reality is that a solid black ad on a white page sucks your eye straight to it, giving your message undivided attention.

Email Marketing - What I Learned this Week

2009-06-07T22:17:00.000+10:00

After almost 10 years as a student of Email Marketing I am still peddling to keep up with this mercurial medium. Below are some key takeouts of what I learned this week...

Twitter
Emails containing links to Twitter are now getting filtered by Barracuda and Spam Assasin.

Product names
If you send emails that contain names of products and spammers have taken to marketing that product, it is likely that the large ISP’s will filter your email regardless of your reputation or the validity of your offering.

Images
Large ISP’s are now scanning your email images to see if they contain large call to action buttons like “Click Here” or pill bottles as these images are often used in spam.

User Interaction
ISP’s track how users interact with your message to see how users interact with your message – beyond the open and click, have they printed it?, trashed it? Forwarded it? This all contributes to your reputation as a sender.

You are getting fingerprinted
ISP’s create a “fingerprint” of you as a mailer using the static components of your messages – including the “From” field, unsubscribe links and CAN SPAM compliance headers.

Google Wave
Google Wave will change everything. I am not sure exactly how yet but it will. Don't take me at my word - watch this.

Under 25’s are trigger happy
You can significantly reduce the number of Spam Complaints that your mailings receive by mailing to 25+ year olds only. Under 25’s know that hitting the “SPAM” button unsubscribes them instantly and they don’t have to hassle with the unsubscribe instructions – unfortunate but true.

Deliverabilty 2009

2009-04-15T10:13:00.001+10:00

I recently was able to spend some time with David Fowler, Director of Deliverability at Lyris where I had the opportunity to question him on some of the most common questions and misconceptions about email deliverability.

After my disastrous foray into managing my own IP reputations (see previous blog) I decided to use an ESP that knew the industry and its considerations inside out. That’s how I came across the LyrisHQ platform.

I had known of and wanted to work with Emaillabs (now a Lyris product) for many years, when I needed to transition to a system that I knew would have everything I needed, Emaillabs (Now LyrisHQ) was the obvious choice for me.

NB: In there interest of full disclosure, I have now become an agent for Lyris in the Australian region. I have become an agent because of my bias toward the product. I am not biased toward the product because I am an agent.

Anyway, I digress…

Below is a summary of the most salient points of our conversation with David. It is paraphrased, as my shorthand skills are non-existent. I prepared a number of questions prior to the meeting, many of these questions we thought we knew the answers to. However we wanted to approach the subjects with an empty cup, so to speak.

Are words like Free, Win, Contest a real problem for deliverability or are they just contributing factors in spam weighting systems? Our businesses depend on these words as they accurately describe the nature of the products and/or services we are promoting.

Words like free, cash and so forth are becoming decreasingly relevant for ISP’s in determining whether a piece of content is likely to be unwanted or SPAM. In the case of a contest or free sample site, these words are the most accurate way to describe the content and nature of the offer and therefore represent relevant content.

Content has a bearing but is not the deciding factor on whether you get delivered, junked bounced or filtered but the reputation of your domain , the IP range that you are mailing from and level of engagement of your clients are the biggest contributors to your delivery or lack thereof.

What should we be most concerned with?

The health of your data would be the single biggest contributing factor to the health of your reputation with ISP’s. If you have a huge list of people that you haven’t contacted or have failed in delivering to for 2 years, you will need to devise a strategy for ramping up communication. This strategy may include up front header reminders with an obvious opt out button at the top of your message – at least until you are rid of all the people who don’t want to be there anymore.

Mailing to dead data is not a neutral act. ISPs will build your reputation or downgrade it based on your open and click rates. Mailing to hard bounces repeatedly is murderous for reputation.

Our presumption has always been that reputation ranged from neutral to trash. Are you saying reputation can be built positively based on content, open, click and complaint rate?

Yes

So are you saying that how good our emails look even effect reputations?

One has to assume that, whether it is true or not, a real human being is viewing your content and judging its relevance to the end user and what they have subscribed to.

Is double opt-in necessary? We find that there is a huge number of people who choose to join a list and don’t action the confirmation. We believe they are presuming that they are already members.

It is not totally necessary to go to double opt in. The fact that you have expressed consent to communicate with your end users makes your program way above the standards of many US mailers. Of course, if I am to go in to bat for you with an ISP, the fact that you are double opt-in certainly helps as it’s the highest level of permission and consent a mailer can achieve.

Should my links, reply address, image sources and unsubs all be coming from the same domain?

Ideally yes - these factors all contribute to the perceived quality of your list and content.

After my debacle trying to manage my own IP’s I want a company like Lyris to do the work for me. If I use the product as the image host, reply handling and link tracker am I effectively leaving the deliverability up to Lyris – is there an issue with this?

No actually we recommend that is what you do. If your practices were a concern to us we would let you know. If mailers aren’t playing nice in the shared pool we have to take responsibility for it. It is in our interest to keep the pool clean as our reputation is on the line too.

Since our conversation with David I issued the following instructions to our delivery team…  
• Trash serial non responders – defined as people who have subscribed before 14 days ago and have not opened OR clicked any message for 4 months or more

• Host all images in the Lyris site and reference them there.

• Keep the reply to email the default Lyris one (for Lyris client I would advise them against customising tracking links and reply from addresses as this means they are taking on half the reputation responsibility)

• Always use tracking in order that all URL’s are Lyris servers

• Ensure there are not mailings that are all image regardless of whether they come through ok in testing (It needs to be a readable and coherent email with the images suppressed)  

• Use pre header text to ensure the crux of the message can be read with the images suppressed

 We have seen instant improvements as a result of the above policies – more details when we have enough data to prove the results.

2009-03-08T10:54:00.001+11:00

Last year, after 8 years in the B2C email marketing business, I finally decided it was time to buy a mailing solution and host it myself. After all this was the next logical step at my volume and would mean that my email delivery cost line would flat line.

It was the right decision for the right reasons. In fact, a few providers were looking at me sideways when i told them how many million emails I was deploying a still paying an ESP (Email Service Provider).

The only catch with my new platform was that I would have to manage my own relationship with the ISP's and keep my IP/S clean.

No problem for a guy who lives, eats and breathes email marketing right?

Wrong!

There is an abundance of information out there on how to configure your IP's, Feedback loops, reputation monitoring, SPF, Sender ID, Sender Certification, Domain Keys, DKIM and whatever the standard du jour is.

Does it help? Well yes - kind of.

If you are an email marketing company and you want to get your email delivered into Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Live and all the other usual suspects, you will need a hell of a lot of patience and very deep pockets to establish your own reputation. I think I might have been close. Unfortunately I ran out of funds and customers with patience while I worked on it.

After three frustrating months of communicating with Hotmail and the like on issues like IP blocking and content filtering, I had to cry Uncle.

Don't get me wrong. Everyone I spoke to were empathic and responsive (though I couldn't determine who was real, a server or an outsourced response person with a form letter). The only problem was, nobody couldn't help me.

i would be told my commercial email was blocked due to content that appears like spam and, even though we know you are not a spammer because you have identified yourself, what your company does and taken responsibility for the commercial email you send, we are still going to leave your blocked for 72 hours as a matter of policy - sorry.

"No problems. I will just get another 20k out of the bank and flush it down the toilet. And hey..thanks so much for your candor".

After a while I was spending so much time and money on the issue, I forgot what I did for a living.

I applied for sender certification, and probably would have qualified, except I had to maintain a certain volume of delivery and keep a low enough complaint and blocking rate for a certain period in order to get approved.

Great, except I was getting consistently blocked by hotmail as my advertising clients use nasty words when they run a legitimate prize promotion like... "prize promotion", "win" and other spammy filth.

After crying uncle, I looked for the best email marketing solution there was - migrated my lists, started sending and low and behold - my email gets delivered.

I use ESP's domain to send from and their shared IP's reputation. They spend their days working out what the latest geeky standard needs to be, how their email needs to be delivered, in what volumes and how to maintain a good ISP/ESP relationship and I deliver the content my subscriber signed up for.

2009-03-08T10:39:00.000+11:00

• What is CPA? And what’s the best way to describe how it works?

CPA stands for Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action. CPA campaigns typically attract no media costs from the publisher. Payment is made only when a member of the target audience responds or acts in the way that the advertiser has defined in an arrangement with the publisher or network of publishers.

An action can be but is not limited to:
• A completed survey
• A purchase
• A newsletter or panel signup
• A download
• A click or website visit

Terms also associated with CPA are
• CPC – Cost per Click
• CPR – Cost per Response
• CPL – Cost per Lead?
• So, you are telling me that all I pay for is the result…how does that work
Usually, though not always, CPA campaigns are tracked entirely online using a post-click tracking pixel.

A pixel is a small piece of code, provided by your publisher or network partner, that will need to be placed on the website page that loads immediately after the desired user action has taken place.

Let’s take the example of a newsletter signup…
A piece of code will be placed on the page that says “Thank your for your subscription” or something to that effect. These pages are often referred to as “Thank You”,“ Confirmation” or “Success” pages
This piece of code allows the publisher to see the effect of their campaign in real time. With live tracking a publisher is able to optimise your campaign to the most effective ad positions in real time.

The pixel also allows a publisher network to associated actions and remunerations accurately to the publishers, placements and ad units that have provided the responses to the campaign.

• Why would I want to run a CPA campaign?
CPA campaigns allow advertisers to run their campaigns with no risk of wasting media budget on unsuccessful placements – for most advertisers this is a no-brainer

• Why would a publisher run CPA campaigns instead of selling media space?
Selling media is a tough business. A publisher must convince advertisers that that there is a strong value proposition in buying a placement. Lead times are long, sales people are expensive the volume of unsold inventory in even the most highly prized properties can be staggeringly high.

With CPA media the value proposition is stronger and the risk is lower for the advertiser. Therefore the publisher can monetise their inventory fully and more rapidly.
A CPA campaign should be a win-win scenario for both publisher and advertiser.

• Yeah, great, but what’s the catch?
CPA media is sought after for obvious reasons. Publishers are not obliged to run your campaign if they don’t feel it has a strong enough offer or call to action. In many ways a CPA campaign will give you some real time feedback about your marketing efforts. When the audience doesn’t share your enthusiasm for your product it can be a blow to the ego.
Although discussion is always open, CPA publishers decide at their discretion what runs and where

• Are there things I should be considering before I get started?
Before considering a CPA campaign you will need to know something about your marketing metrics already?

You can expect to be asked by a CPA provider questions that media sales people typically don’t ask – including:
• What is a customer worth to you?
• What is a qualified lead worth to you?
• What volume of leads per month are you equipped to sustain

• What about the creative, what formats are being used/supported?
HTML email is a must for CPA campaigns. Most CPA network drive strong volume from permission email partners. Additionally you should provide image creatives in .gif or .jpeg formats. Your CPA network partner will provide you a list of required creative sizes.

Don’t spend money on flash creative – many providers won’t run it. There are speed, tracking and compatibility issues with flash. As boring as it may seem – animated image creatives perform better and are more stable.

• How much control do I have over budgets and quantity of responses?
You can dictate your budget and quantity of responses in terms of maximums. If you require a certain volume per day or a particular demographic disposition you may experience difficulty finding publishers that can monitor and control these factors. It doesn’t hurt to ask though.

• What offers work the best and is it better for some products over others?
Campaigns targeted to the household decision maker fare well in CPA space. The people who respond most readily to online surveys, offers and promotions are typically the same people who buy the groceries, pay the insurance and have most influence over the discretionary spend in the household. Young males are notoriously difficult to motivate online. Over 55’s are low in volume but those who are available do tend to respond well.

• Top 10 Do’s
1. Have a strong offer and call to action.

2. Keep the offer simple.

3. Know what your competition is offering and don’t be second best.

4. Make the entire transaction or interaction online (people online want to respond online).

5. Ask where your campaign is going to be placed and why (you might learn something).

6. Negotiate a point in the campaign where you can analyse the quality of your leads and re-negotiate if need be.

7. Listen to publisher feedback. These guys run a lot of campaigns and can tell you what works.

8. Implement your own tracking system so that you can compare with and back up the CPA network stats.

9. Have several text versions of your offer – on site and newsletter text is some of the most effective and undervalued media available

10. Test and Optimise

• Top 10 Don’ts...

1. Get sucked into a CPM-A deal. In these deals you are supposed to pay for the media but the publisher asserts that they will work towards your CPA goal. They probably will. However it will happen in their time – not yours. CPA campaigns tend to get optimised daily whereas a CPM-A deal will get optimised monthly and not so aggressively.

2. Mistake a 10% discount for an offer. It may technically be an offer but the online audience is not motivated by it.

3. Sign an exclusive agreement with a network for longer than 90 days.

4. Judge the sites your campaign is being run on until you see the metrics.

5. Pay for post impression leads. What you want is post click leads. With post impression leads you may pay for people who found you on Google just because your ad loaded when they were on another site. In short – if they didn’t click the ad the site should not get paid. Post impression leads are not so common on CPA networks but are quite common on banner networks.

6. Drive traffic to you home page and hope that the end user will navigate your site to the place of transaction. Build a campaign specific landing page with the offer and instructions on one page.

7. Expect the CPA network or publisher to come up with ideas, creative’s and strategies. This is the job of agencies. It is a good idea to talk to the publishers about what works prior to engaging your agency so that you can be more prescriptive with your brief.

8. Spend large amounts of money on rich media creative – there is no need for flash movies. CPA publishers are not big fans of rich media.

9. Give up if your first campaign doesn’t work as you expect – if you ask the publishers the right questions you will get the answers you need to create the right campaign.

10. Wait to see if this idea catches on. With the economic downturn CPA campaigns are attracting increasing budgets from the big advertisers. Relationship with the publishers is the key to success. You don’t want to be the last in your field to get started.